"Tanzer's greatest talent is his ability to make the personal universal." The New York Stories. The Clayton Smith. The appreciations.

Endless. All of it. Excerpt? Totally.

"All of these tales center around a fictional small town in upstate New York, the sort of unimpressive geographical black hole that you hate growing up in but don't ever seen quite able to escape. Maybe this collection speaks so loudly to me because I'm from a town just like Tanzer's fictional Two Rivers, New York, but I think the fundamental truth of the place and its people is rooted in all of us; we grow up thinking we know everything, and that everything is tragic, and we grow old learning that the tragedy is what we've made for ourselves."